Parallax

On the internet, as usual, one thing leads to another. Somewhere in the vicinity of two in the morning (locally known as Oh Dark Hundred and/or Stupid O'Clock) I found myself on a website where I had been collected and indexed like some kind of trading card or exotic bug.

What I found is a website dedicated to Everyone, Ever, Who Is Connected To Kasmu In Any Way. I'm there, and my mom and grandma, and her cousins and wacky world-travelling talking to herself Laine and Hans with the boats and the being shipwrecked repeatedly, and old Antonia whose sewing machine my mail gets left on where it sits quietly until I find it a week later. We're all there. All these people that I know, and tell crazy stories about.

The stories aren't there, though. That makes it all feel weird, and sort of sterile, because that's how we keep track of each other. Potholders, herring, boats, clarinets, the basement at Macy's, embroidery, Lucky Strike, cameo pins, potatoes, Hummels, the devil's rock, sunburn, embassies, shortwave radios, carpentry. It's like Trachimbrod in Everything is Illuminated, the stories and clutter (mental, physical) are what we use to remember.

The stories I know are mostly on this side of the Atlantic. What I know about Kasmu isn't much. I know that's where everyone came from, and that they built a lot of boats. I know that you went to the sauna (which has a gnome in it) and then jumped into the lake in the middle of winter, because .. ok, I never found out why the hell they did that. I know there were cows and fish. Lots of lucky herring. Vodka. I got the idea that Kasmu could be translated from Estonian as: "small bump on the coast where you build boats and go sailing because there is fuck-all else to do except get drunk in the sauna and tip the cows over." I've looked at it on Google Maps and it has something like four intersections.

( I know these are my people because they're all pale and rounded and grumpy in the old photos. )

So: the whole point to this is that I find it hilarious I've been collected and indexed by some stranger halfway across the world. I feel like an action figure. One of the really random and useless ones, like the thing that was only in two scenes in Jabba's palace, that I spotted, begged for, and got at a toy store when I was maybe three. How I still have that, I don't know. Or why my mother got it for me. Why I wanted it is easier: if given the choice between a fuzzy Ewok and a weird-looking lizard bug flatworm thing, I go with the lizard bug flatworm thing.

Wonder what kinds of interesting lizards and bugs and worm things I could find in Kasmu....

I tell my mother I am going to the store and ask if there is anything she needs. She, instead, asks me what I'm getting. I recite a short list. Toilet paper, etc, etc. "Oh, and herring."

"Herring!"

"Herring."

"Get the kind in cream sauce."

For a second we stare at each other. "Ma, you've been forcing that stuff down my gob once a year since I was old enough to eat solid food. I think I know what kind to get."

Being Estonian is difficult sometimes. I think the meaning of this tradition is that you should not welcome change, because change means forcing yourself to eat over-salted dead fish in sour cream with onions. Maybe when they got Jesus they got the kind that was all about torturing yourself. Maybe the herring explains why everything else is so bland (vodka, potatoes) because they routinely torture their tongues. I don't know. Another Estonian proverb: It Could Be Worse. I have no idea what sort of culinary disasters they routinely get up to in The Old Country, and around this time every year I'm thankful to Antonia for that fact.

In other news, we have a misguided whale in the water.

Edit, about an hour later: I got my herring. There was a lady standing next to me at the grocery store, with a packet of some kind of Salmon Gone Wrong in one hand and something else in the other. Being that my non-resolution this year is to Stop Being So Goddamn Shy, I said, is it just me with the wacky eastern-European relatives who want fish for new year's? She laughed and said no, hers too. I said mine were Estonian; she said hers were Siberian. SIBERIAN! How badass is that?